When running Gradle on Debian 2.30.2, I am unable to build my jar file because Gradle can’t find commons-codec:commons-codec:1.4:jar. Things work fine on a Mac, and Maven is able to find commons-codec on Debian.

The explanation is that the Maven Central problems are temporary. Starting from Gradle 1.3, failed artifact lookups will no longer be cached across invocations of Gradle, so there should be much less need for ‘–refresh-dependencies’.